Unofficial news and tips about Google

March 25, 2013

Google Shows Results for Similar Searches

Google has a new feature that shows results for different versions of your query. Usually Google removes one or two keywords from your query or replaces them with similar keywords if there aren't many relevant search results for your original query.

Here's another example: [gingerbread install chrome browser manually]. This time, Google returns 4 results for your query and 6 results for related queries. Obviously, you can't install Chrome in Android 2.3 and Google's results should help you find this information.

This feature used to be an experiment, but now it should be publicly available. Unfortunately, Google shows results for too many different queries and not all of them are useful. Some of Google's suggestions remove important keywords from the query and that's a mistake. For example, removing "gingerbread" from [gingerbread install chrome browser manually] returns results related to the desktop Chrome. Maybe Google could automatically detect nonessential keywords and show results that don't include them instead of cluttering the list of results with so many options.

10 comments:

This is particularly annoying as Google will often give only one or two relevant results before filling up the rest of the page with similar search results. This means you have to scroll down and go to the next page to get the results you're actually looking for.

I do not enjoy this feature at all and find it extremely unhelpful, I wish there was a way to disable it. If I set my search results to show 50 results, I want it to show 50 results. Instead it shows 4 results from my search and 9 results for searches similar to mine. I have to constantly click on the 2nd page so that I can begin to filter through the results.

They are getting big company attitudes. Google is not here to help you, it is here to milk opportunities provided by it's users, to make money for Google. An example being the inability to block results from Ehow.